Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall joins multistate lawsuit against Purdue Pharma

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has added the state to a growing list of governments suing Purdue Pharma, the company behind OxyContin, one of the most widely abused prescription painkillers in the country. The move puts Alabama formally among the states pressing the pharmaceutical manufacturer in court over its role in an epidemic that has hit the state harder than almost any other.

The complaint, filed on behalf of Alabama residents, accuses Purdue of violating the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act through the way it marketed and sold opioid medications. State lawyers argue those practices endangered public health and the safety of Alabamians. Alabama is seeking both monetary damages and court orders to change the company’s conduct — a combination that aims not merely to collect from the company but to force changes in how it promotes and distributes its products going forward.

The legal theory rests on marketing rather than the drug itself. Purdue’s OxyContin, a long-acting formulation of oxycodone introduced in the 1990s, became one of the most prescribed painkillers in America amid a promotional campaign that courts and regulators in other states have scrutinized for minimizing the drug’s addictive potential. Claims under state deceptive trade practices statutes allow governments to argue that the company’s representations to doctors and patients were misleading, independently of criminal liability.

Alabama’s decision to join the litigation reflects the scale of the crisis within its borders. It is joining other states, cities and hospital systems across the country that have targeted the manufacturers of prescription painkillers they blame for the opioid crisis, a wave of litigation that has grown into one of the largest coordinated legal campaigns against a single industry since the tobacco settlements of the late 1990s.

A Shift for Marshall

The decision marks a shift for Marshall. Speaking to a group in Mobile last year, he said his office had avoided using “civil litigation to regulate industries or to coerce windfall settlements,” and questioned whether suing opioid makers was “the right way to go.” The comments placed him among the more skeptical of state attorneys general at a moment when many of his counterparts were racing to file.

Since then, Marshall’s position has evolved along with the evidence and the national litigation landscape. He has joined a multistate investigation of drugmakers led by a coalition of attorneys general, a process that pools investigative resources and gives smaller states like Alabama leverage alongside much larger counterparts. Participation in such coalitions typically gives state officials access to millions of internal industry documents gathered through discovery — material that has proven persuasive in reshaping earlier skepticism about the strength of the claims.

Marshall has also served on an opioid council created by Gov. Kay Ivey that released recommendations late last year. That seat put the attorney general inside the state government’s broader policy response — examining treatment capacity, enforcement, and prevention — and gave him a statewide view of the epidemic’s costs that reaches well beyond what any single court file can show. The council’s work reflected a recognition in Montgomery that the crisis required both litigation and administrative action at the same time.

“The opioid epidemic has devastated Alabama families, leaving a trail of addiction and death winding through every community of this state,” Marshall said in announcing the suit. The language was notably stronger than his remarks of a year earlier, framing the litigation not as an expansion of government power but as a response to damage already done.

The Numbers Behind the Case

Alabama leads the nation in painkiller prescriptions per capita, and an estimated 30,000 residents over age 17 are dependent on heroin or prescription painkillers, according to figures Marshall cited. Both statistics have appeared repeatedly in state and federal assessments of the crisis, and together they explain why Alabama’s experience of the opioid epidemic has been disproportionate even by the standards of a national emergency.

The prescription figures reflect a prescribing culture that took root in the state over two decades, in which high-volume dispensing of opioid medications became routine across much of rural and small-town Alabama. Public health researchers have tied states’ prescription rates to a combination of aggressive pharmaceutical marketing, pain management standards that pushed opioids toward first-line status, and limited access to alternative therapies — conditions that were pronounced across the Southeast.

For a state of Alabama’s size, roughly 30,000 people dependent on heroin or prescription painkillers represents an extraordinary burden: families strained, workforces thinned, county jails and emergency rooms absorbing the overflow, and foster care systems stretched by parents lost to addiction. Rural counties with few treatment providers have often been hit hardest, which is part of why state officials describe the epidemic as reaching every community rather than concentrating in cities.

Those realities have made the question of recovery funds a live political issue in Montgomery. Whatever money ultimately flows from opioid litigation — whether through settlements with Purdue and other manufacturers or judgments at trial — state leaders will face decisions about how to direct it among treatment, recovery housing, law enforcement, and prevention programs. Marshall’s entry into the suit positions the attorney general’s office as a central player in that process.

How the Case Will Proceed

Marshall said he attended a court-ordered settlement conference in Cleveland last month, a signal that the litigation has reached the stage where negotiation runs parallel to the courtroom fight. Multidistrict opioid proceedings consolidated in Ohio federal court have pushed manufacturers toward the table, with courts pressing both sides to consider global resolutions that would resolve the claims of hundreds of governments at once.

Settlement conferences of that kind matter to states like Alabama because they compress timelines. A trial verdict, followed by appeals that could run for years, offers little near-term relief to communities coping with the epidemic now. A negotiated resolution, by contrast, can deliver both money and behavioral commitments — changes to how a company markets and monitors its products — on a faster clock, which is precisely the combination the state says it is seeking in its complaint.

The state will be represented by two private law firms working under the supervision of attorneys from the Attorney General’s office. The arrangement has become standard in large-scale government litigation: outside firms advance the considerable costs of taking on major pharmaceutical companies and are compensated from any recovery, while the state retains control of strategy and settlement decisions through its own lawyers.

For Alabamians, the suit’s practical stakes come down to two questions — whether the state recovers significant damages from the company it blames for misleading doctors and patients, and whether court-ordered conduct changes prevent the same marketing playbook from being applied to the next generation of painkillers. Marshall’s office, having shifted from skepticism to litigation, is now betting that the courts can deliver both.

The Alabama case also lands within a wider accountability push that has reached nearly every corner of the opioid supply chain. Beyond manufacturers, states and local governments have sued distributors who shipped millions of pills into small communities and pharmacy chains that filled the prescriptions, arguing that each link in the chain knew or should have known the volumes were unsustainable. Purdue, as the maker of the drug that ignited the crisis, remains the centerpiece defendant, but the broader litigation has taught officials that recovery claims work best when they are coordinated rather than piecemeal.

Marshall’s participation in the coalition of attorneys general matters for exactly that reason. States that litigate alone face discovery battles, expert wars, and settlement leverage calculations that can swamp a small attorney general’s office. States that pool their efforts share evidence, align their legal theories, and negotiate from a position that manufacturers cannot divide one by one. Alabama’s earlier hesitation meant it watched that machinery build from the sidelines; its entry now means it will be at the table when the structure of any national resolution takes shape.

The governor’s opioid council, meanwhile, represents the policy side of the same equation. Litigation proceeds — if and when they arrive — will flow into systems that the council’s recommendations are meant to improve: treatment availability in rural counties, medication-assisted recovery programs, training and naloxone distribution for first responders, and public awareness campaigns aimed at keeping experimental use from becoming dependence. The overlap between Marshall’s litigation role and his council seat is by design, ensuring the state’s courtroom strategy and its public health strategy inform each other.

What happens in Cleveland and in the courtrooms connected to it will take time to resolve, and no one involved expects a quick conclusion. But for Alabama, the filing marks a clear position: the state with the nation’s highest per-capita painkiller prescription rate has decided that the company behind OxyContin should answer for its marketing in Alabama courts, under Alabama’s own Deceptive Trade Practices Act, with damages and conduct remedies both on the table. For the families in every Alabama community that Marshall says the epidemic has devastated, the suit is the state’s most concrete step yet toward making the industry share the cost of the crisis.